Since the advent of the National Broadband
Network, our network troubles are over—aren't they? Today I discovered that I had
lost connection round 16:10. Called up Aussie Broadband support and went through the usual debugging steps. At least he
didn't ask me to reboot my computer, but he did ask if I had a spare router lying around. I
did, and it also got no connection.

How do you debug this kind of problem? The NTD is pretty much a black box. We know that
it's an Ethernet bridge, but how exactly does it work? What do these constantly flashing
LEDs mean? On powerup it goes through a whole cycle of undocumented (to me, anyway)
flashing LED sequences, but it presents an Ethernet carrier almost immediately. Will (the
Aussie support person) told me that he could see some kind of connection, but he was hazy
about what it was. He checked the NBN outage notices, but found nothing, so he lodged a
fault with NBN.

Of course, connectivity came back at about 17:08. What caused it? What kind of reliability
can I expect? Sent a message out on Facebook and got confirmation that a number of other people were
affected too. Whose fault? Aussie or NBN? I forgot to ask what ISP the others use.

It's time to get rid of my old Olympus E-30. eBay's the place to do that, of course, so collected my
photos and set off to list it.

Things have changed at eBay, not only the massive breach of security they had a few weeks
back, and which they didn't report to their users until much later—I heard about it on the
radio news. But they've also changed their listing policies since I last sold something, so
it was a little slow.

But that wasn't all. After filling out all the fields, I got a message:

OK, what policy? They don't say. Tried removing the photo. Same message. And what about
the weight? The “Weight” text is a broken link, and I can't find anywhere on the form to
enter the weight. And after a couple of attempts, I got another message:

Another set of NiZn batteries were
discharged today, this time in the indoor “weather station” thermometer. Nothing unusual,
two AAs in series. But this time the end voltages were 0.360 V and 1.685 V. The latter is
hardly discharged at all, but clearly there's something seriously wrong with the former. I
have about 6 cells like that. I'm getting the feeling that they're reaching the end of
their life.

I then let him run to the junction (I think) of Swamp Road, then putting him back in the
line when we enter the forest. Zhivago is
already off the line at that point, and from time to time they play with each other.

Today was a little different. They both headed off east to the lagoon (which is just to the
right in the photo above), and they didn't come back. By the time I went down to follow
them, they were round the north side, nearly a kilometer away. No question of following
them. But then Nikolai came back, shot past me and went back to Yvonne and Tanya. Zhivago took a little
longer, but he also came back.

So: should we let them do that? It's too far for my taste, but clearly they need more
exercise.

First thing this morning, called Mathew Mertuszka at the Council. And second thing. And
third thing. First time round I left a message, but it took until lunch time to find that
he wasn't in the office.

In the meantime Tessa Ambrose had sent me new requirements for the house that apparently
hadn't been recognized beforehand, including the information that we couldn't get a building
permit until we had a septic tank permit (construction costs: $13,486). She also quoted for
water tanks: $17,758.45 without the pump. That's clearly not competitive, so went out
looking for details. First a call with Barb at the council, who told me that it would
probably take 2 or 3 weeks to get the permit, and who gave me a whole list of plumbers
without phone numbers.

Went looking for them in the phone book,
which was not very informative: I only found about half the numbers. The main ones
in Ballarat seem to be Billy den Ouden
and Mari Hendriks—is it a coincidence that they're both Dutch? The only one I could get on
the phone was Billy den Ouden, who gave me a quote for a septic for $9,720 plus another
$2,591 for a pump. It seems that sewers no longer work without a pump if the land is flat,
unlike the three systems we had at Wantadilla and here.

But quotes like that suggest that there's some margin for error. Called up Stewart Summersby
and asked his advice. He recommended Mari Hendriks, who was due to call back in the
evening. He did that, but he can't come to inspect the site until Saturday—at 9:00! Still,
he sounds like the bloke we need, in particular because he can do the water tanks as well
(den Ouden can't), so we'll have to live with that.

The other news was that apparently we don't need concrete tanks for everything, which is
just as well given the price. While looking through old notes I found our estimates: $5,000
each for water tanks and septic system. I fear we'll come closer to double that.

We've been waiting for the activation of a SIM card from ALDI mobile and two debit cards from ANZ bank. It's not clear than any of them have worked.
The last thing I heard from ALDI mobile was:

Transferring your number can take from 4 to 48 business hours to
complete, and we appreciate your patience.

Whilst you are waiting for your transfer to complete, you can track
the progress of your order by logging in to your account using your
account number (instead of your mobile number).

Your account number is: and your account password is: . Once you have
logged in you can change your password to something more memorable.

Now isn't that handy? Clearly I can't “log in”, but what has happened to the activation?
That was sent 5 days ago, and assuming that “48 business hours” doesn't mean “6 business
days”, it should have been completed long ago.

That's not the only one. Round the same
time I activated our new debit cards—maybe. Mine told me it was successful, but when
I tried to activate Yvonne's, it told me that it failed. And
Yvonne has now confirmed that yes, indeed, it hasn't been activated. Was it ever? Is mine?
Why not? Why do banks have such incredible problems with computers and security?

I've been making photos, mainly panoramas, of
the garden for nearly 7 years now, but clearly it's going to stop when the new house
is complete. Time to set up a new series. It's not easy to guess where to start, but
clearly now is the time. Here are the first three views, from the north-west, the west and
south-west of the house:

Finally got on to Mathew Mertuszka at the council this morning. He clarified a
number of things: we still need a building permit for a shed, but a building surveyor can do
that. The only water tank that needs to be out of non-combustible material is the
fire-fighting tank for the CFA. Apart from
that, the only (big) issue was this stupid Biodiversity stuff. It seems that the rules have been changed since the end of
March, and now we really do need to go through this rigmarole. What a pain! I couldn't
bring myself to call them up, but I'm going to have to do so soon, once I can be relatively
confident to keep a civil tongue in my head.

But we can get started with the shed. Called up Widespan and finally got on the John Farquhar, who came up with some additional
charges, more than offset by a 5% discount. Now we just need to find somebody to issue a
building permit and erect it for us. Hopefully it can be the same person.

And JG King had still more charges to
make. Clearly we don't need them to install tanks and septic system at their exaggerated
prices. But I got Yet Another Unexpected Charge: $2,669 just to connect to our septic tank
and water tanks. In addition, it seems, they won't be able to sign a contract for another 4
to 5 weeks. When construction starts is anybody's guess, but I can't see it being before
August. I'm getting more and more fed up with these people. Today's additional connection
charges are more than we have paid them already. Is it time to reconsider our builder?

One of the more interesting services of SBS is
the foreign language news service they offer. I regularly watch Al Jazeera, and since the beginning of
the Ukraine crisis I've been
watching Deutsche Welle news as well.

SBS has streams in various definitions, in particular SBS HD (1080i) and SBS 2 (576i). Some
programmes, like DW news, are broadcast on both streams, and since my reception is so bad, I
record both to be surer of getting a good recording. And so I notice the size of the files.

Resolution isn't everything, of course. Compression makes a big difference to the size of
the image. For a long time, the DW news on SBS HD was about 2.3 GB in size, while the SBS 2
version was 900 MB. Then on 11 April they changed the data rates. To what? Who knows?
The information in the Transport
Stream is wrong, and shows the 1080i stream to be slower than the 567i stream. But the
sizes diverged, to 650 MB and 3.3 GB. That makes sense to me.

Today, though, they must have let the apprentices run the show. The recordings were
suddenly 1.8 GB and 1.2 GB, both in 576i—and without sound! Later in the day they had
recovered, and Al Jazeera was at the normal size again—but the wrong programme! Instead of
news they had some technology programme, something I really don't need to watch. I wonder
if there's anybody at SBS keeping an eye on these things.

Off to the house site this morning to meet with Stewart Summersby and plan the driveway and
power connections. It looks as if the obvious entrance, pointing straight at the garage,
isn't the optimal one, because we need a hammerhead to turn in. But that's minor, and
there's a good chance that Stewart can start on Friday. Finally things are starting
to happen.

Several messages back and forth with Tessa Ambrose today. By late afternoon we had agreed
that our people would connect water tanks and septic—and despite this meaning less work for
JG King, they didn't credit us with
anything. I am getting really fed up.

It took a while, but finally I have an answer from eBay about my listing problems. In fact, the support person (later identified as Jehan) went to a lot of trouble and
just about listed the item for me. The problem? Who knows? He suggested clearing all
cookies, which might have made a difference, but a lot of those cookies are unrelated to
eBay, and any script that is so confused by them is clearly badly written. I wonder if this
has been reported to the software development people. I suspect not, since they didn't ask
me for any more details.

Finally got round to calling DEPI about
the “biodiversity offsets” today. It took them something like 10 minutes to find the right
bloke, Nick Jaschenko
in Ballarat, and of course he wasn't in. He called back a little later and confirmed my
worst fears: yes, doing it on-site is not the way to go. The registration alone would cost
me over $1,000, and the other requirements, like setting aside 1 ha for the purpose and
making annual reports, make it impractical.

The alternative is to buy credits. And looking at the small amount I need, it will only
cost about $1,000—he says. It seems that the going rate is $35,000 to $50,000 per credit.
But first I have to find somebody to sell it to me, and he sent me a list of only 7 brokers.

One fear didn't materialize: Nick was very friendly and helpful within his limitations, and
we had quite a constructive discussion. But I still consider this to be utter nonsense.
Yes, protecting biodiversity is a laudable aim. But is this the way to do it? Looking at
the list of brokers, half of them have only a mobile phone number, and none have addresses.
This looks like another opportunity for fly-by-night operators.

Apart from that, we finally have a preliminary quote from Tessa. We now have the credit for
the components they don't need to supply, but only because I was “insistent”: $1,398! I'd
certainly insist on that sort of thing again.

In the afternoon over to the new property with the dogs, and let them run together for the
first time since I don't know when. They ran around like fury for a few minutes while I
tried to get my camera together, and by the time I did they had calmed down considerably.

Woken up at 0:57 by the UPSs beeping: another power failure. That's so common here
that I don't do more than confirm the fact.

But it wasn't the only failure. My nightly mythfilldatabase run failed. Why? This
stuff is so opaque that I really don't know. Tried
re-running shepherd, which seemed to have forgotten
everything it ever knew, and at the end it could no longer communicate with mythtv:

Huh? /home/mythtv/.mythtv/.xmltv is a directory, not a file. What went wrong there?
Confirmed that I could get the data with shepherd—for a while. And then it claimed
it couldn't find oztivo.net. What went
wrong there? I was about to send Warren a mail message when I discovered we were off the
net. Again!

This time things were different. The illegibly marked LED in the middle of
the NTD was red:

I really needed to take a photo of the device to decipher what it says: ODU. What's that?
Outdoor Unit? That seems to be a term used in microwave technology, but it doesn't really
say very much. It wasn't until some time later that Jürgen Lock found a document that I hadn't seen before, which describes the status lights and their “meaning”, for
(very) end users:

POWER INDICATOR

INDICATOR

MEANING

ACTION

GREEN

Power On

No action is required.

NO LIGHT

No power

Check the NBN connection box is plugged in and switched on.

STATUS INDICATOR

INDICATOR

MEANING

ACTION

GREEN FLASHING

Normal Operation

No action is required.

GREEN

Device is in test mode

No action is required.

AMBER FLASHING

Device is starting up and initialising

No action is required.

RED

There is a system fault

Contact your service provider for assistance.

OUTDOOR UNIT INDICATOR

INDICATOR

MEANING

ACTION

GREEN

Online

No action is required.

GREEN FLASHING

Activity

No action is required.

RED

Offline

Contact your service provider for assistance.

RED FLASHING

There is an error

Contact your service provider for assistance.

SIGNAL INDICATOR

INDICATOR

MEANING

ACTION

RED

Low signal strength (no fault)

No action is required.

AMBER

Medium signal strength

No action is required.

GREEN

High signal strength

No action is required.

In passing, it's interesting to note that this description seems incorrect. I've never seen
the ODU LED show continuous green. It's always flashing, even when no (Ethernet) traffic is
passing. And the signal indicator is three LED, as shown in the diagram.

Without that valuable advice, called up Aussie Broadband and spoke to Brad, who didn't seem to know that information either.
He put me through the usual rigmarole of power cycling, etc, and even checking the carrier
indication on the NTD, conveniently located pointing to the floor, where I could only see it
with a mirror. And he wanted me to disconnect and reconnect the cable, during which I
discovered that the housing is not designed for Ethernet cables:

And of course it made no difference, but Brad wanted to know why the second LED wasn't on.
It took me a while to convince him that it couldn't go on if it wasn't there.

While we were talking, the net came back. First the status changed, and some time later we
had a connection again. But the outage lasted from 12:30:43 to 13:52:16, nearly 1½ hours.
And that's not just the second outage this week. Apart from the one on Sunday, there were two short ones, one
yesterday, one this morning. Posted on Facebook and got the
confirmation that it was an National Broadband
Network fault, not Aussie. I hope things will get a lot better.

But they didn't. Later in the afternoon we had another outage! This time I didn't have to
go through any rigmarole: Eli from Aussie told me that there was a general outage
in Dereel
and Ballarat-but apparently nowhere else
in the area—and that NBNCo was looking at it.

That took a while. We were down from 15:43:44 until 18:32:20. That's a total of over 5
hours outages in the last 5 days. I hope we're going to get an explanation. But in the
meantime it's time to reconsider not having
a POTS connection to
our new house.

The summer was pretty terrible, as I noted in my garden photos page. But now that winter
has started, we're seeing a number of flowers that I hadn't expected, notably
this Kniphofia that normally flowers in
summer:

The light down Kleins Road today was quite pleasant, and it occurred to me to try to capture
the atmosphere with a vertical panorama, showing some of the tall, dead trees in that area.
The results weren't a success:

There are two issues: firstly, this is
a Miller
Cylindrical, and the clue is in the name: it projects differently horizontally and
vertically. But it was the best I found.

The second issue was the way the trees are falling over to the sides. That's the opposite
of the normal converging vertical syndrome. Tried straightening it with the help of
DxO Optics “Pro”, but the results still look completely out of proportion:

Over to the Stones Road property this morning to meet Mari Hendriks, the plumber, and talk
about the septic tank. Yes, it can be done, and he seems to be the bloke to do it, but I
won't have a price until I get my permit. And he won't help me with that. Looks like I'm
not out of the red tape yet.

Spent some more time reluctantly looking at my MythTV problems today. Once again, I see the value of keeping a diary: I got an
almost identical error message 18
months ago. And it looks as if once again
a shepherd update broke things. Unfortunately, the
solution isn't the same. I'm going to have to accept the fact that my MythTV installation,
installed over 5 years ago, is too old.
Can I bear reinstalling it?

So what do I do with my MythTV problems? I
have at least three alternatives: address the immediate problem by modifying or updating the
grabber software, install the latest version of MythTV, or install something else
altogether.

Fixing the problem in the current release has two significant disadvantages: it's probably
only a matter of time before a new shepherd update
will break it again—after all, I had the same issue 18 months ago. And it also requires me
to learn more PERL than I want.

Installing a new version of MythTV makes more sense, but how much work will it be? This has
always been like pulling teeth. So when Jürgen Lock suggested that I install VDR, it made a lot of sense, particularly since he has
adapted it to FreeBSD. In the new house I could then run only one
computer instead of the current two.

But that's still a lot of work, especially since it probably doesn't support my current
tuner cards. Not a big issue: Jürgen found some compatible tuners for under $10 each. But
there's no way to get them before my programme data runs out. Daniel O'Connor suggested
using the EPG, the electronic programme guide
(or is that EIT? That's what Myth calls it).

I've tried that before, but the quality of the information was terrible. But in the short
term it's better than any alternative I could think of, so I tried it. First problem was
getting mythtv-setup to work correctly; alternately it offered just a North America
grabber and all possibilities. Finally got it to use EIT for both tuners, and restarted
myth. No programme data got inserted. Looking at the log file, I found:

The good news is that the quality of the EPG has improved, so I can probably stick with it,
maybe even after the upgrade. The only issue is the extremely limited number of programme
categories, half of which appear to be “Unknown”. That makes the programme display
considerably more difficult.

Last week I tried to sell my old
camera on eBay Australia. The problems I ran
into were clearly bugs. Somewhat to my surprise I got a well-thought out answer to my bug
report a few days later, offering
workarounds for the bugs.

But I didn't want to list it on a Wednesday. I have a hypothesis that from the seller's
perspective the best time for an auction to finish is on a Sunday afternoon, when lots of
people can watch it run to completion. It also seems reasonable to have a 7 day
auction—anything longer tends to get forgotten. So that meant putting it up on a Sunday
afternoon.

Back to the incomplete item description. Yes, now it had weight information, though it's
not clear why. I still couldn't add any more photos (“Maximum 12 photos. 1 loaded. You
can load 0 more”). OK, just get the thing listed. “You can't sell internationally at this
time”. The reasons specified all didn't apply, but who cares? I don't think anybody
outside Australia would be interested anyway. So I selected “no international sales” and
tried again. “You can't sell internationally at this time”.

Grrr! This stuff is still broken. How about listing it on eBay USA? Tried that, and it would have worked, except that
the item location has to be in the USA. But it suggests that the problem is in the (very
different) Australian eBay software. OK, how about trying with a Microsoft-based client?
No change. Maybe the partial listing has a trauma and can't be saved? It would be easier
to start again anyway. But this time it didn't understand the string “Olympus E-30”, and I
had to manually select a category. It did find a stock photo (which I'm not allowed
to use because the camera isn't new), but when I tried to enter one of mine, it took me back
to the “please select category” page, even though I had already selected one:

It's coming on 6 months since we signed
an agreement with JG King. At the
time we were talking about having the house completed in September, three months' time. Now
it's looking like it'll take at least another 6 months.

What went wrong? Even then we weren't expecting the planning permit until April. That was
only delayed by one month, and if we had known, we could have had it much earlier than
April. What has really taken an eternity is the JG King bureaucracy. Tom Tyler told us we
didn't really do much until we applied for the planning permit. So we applied for the
permit on 31 March and told Tom on
4 April. The planning permit came through on 30 May. We're still waiting for the
contract, and it doesn't look as if we'll get it this month. Why?

Yesterday Mari Hendriks told me that Simonds build houses in 17 days. That sounds like enough difference to consider changing. After
all, all we have spent so far is $1,500, which includes a soil test that other builders
might accept. So off into town—alone, since Yvonne is fed up
to the back teeth with the whole matter—to see what the competition looks like.

As it happened, first to Simonds. The advertised build time isn't 17 days, it's 14 weeks—a
little over 3 months. And that's only for houses built with no changes. But they have
others, and a guaranteed build time of 5 months, which might still prove to be faster than
JG King.

Then on to look at the other builders. Most were closed! Today is one of the many
birthdays of Queen Elizabeth
II, in this case of Australia, and I had expected the place to be crawling. In fact,
apart from Simonds and JG King, only Metricon was open. They have a reputation for being more expensive, but it was worth checking. I
told the representative, Tim Britt, about our problems with the contract, though I didn't
think it appropriate to mention the name of the builder. It seems I didn't need to: “Ah,
that was J.G. King, was it?”. They seem to be known for that.

I looked at the plans first, and decided on the one that I liked
most; by chance, it was one of the display homes there, so in to take a look. About $25,000
more expensive than the Adelphi II that we're currently planning, but that depends on the
details: we're well over $25,000 over the base price with this house. Back home with lots
of brochures. What should we do?

That didn't quite work out: I thought I had some in the freezer, but I didn't. So we just
made the enchiladas with the ALDI sauce, which had a surprisingly gloopy consistency. And
it didn't taste much good—not because of the sauce, but because I've come to the conclusion
that I don't like enchiladas very much.

Stewart Summersby along this morning with the address for the gravel for the driveway.
We're only putting the rough stuff on at this point: we can do the rest after the house is
complete and there won't be so many trucks going over it. To be delivered tomorrow. At
least some things are moving.

I've decided that Tessa Ambrose is not particularly used to correspondence by email—why
should she be? So to move things faster, I've taken to speaking to her on the phone and
confirming the conversation by email. Today we had two calls, and it looks as if we have
tied most things up: we'll connect power for water pump (and sewage if necessary) via the
shed rather than via the house, since otherwise they require not only a power point on the
outside wall, far from anything that can use it, and also a junction box, something that
neither Stewart nor Mari understood. And there should be no problems with the downpipes
from the gutters to the underground pipes to the water tanks.

About the only thing that could be an issue is the frame for the TV. Normally this sort of
thing is attached to walls by going through the plasterboard into the studs. But JG King houses have metal frames, so they don't
have conventional wooden studs. How do we connect it? Tessa volunteered the information
that she had no trouble with her TV, which is bigger than ours. That sounded
promising—until I asked if she had a JG King home. No, normal wooden studs.

It seems that it is possible to screw into the C-shaped profiles that JG King use,
but it seems that they haven't found it necessary to come up with recommendations. Maybe
we'll have to put wood behind the wall. That's OK for the immediate question of the TV, but
what happens in a few years' time when we replace it?

I've been keeping an eye on my TV reception quality for nearly 3 years now, and I still don't understand why sometimes things are normal, and
sometimes the image quality is completely unacceptable, to the point where no data at all
are recorded. I've eliminated most things, including the tuners and cabling.

But since my reconfiguration of the system over the weekend, things are different.
Recordings on tuner 1 are consistently fine, and recordings on tuner 2 are consistently
unusable. Why? I didn't do anything with the hardware. It looks as if it must be
something to do with the configuration itself, which is certainly confused: it had lost the
names of the tuners, for example. One possibility might be that the tuners get tuned to a
different frequency. But so far I can't see anything in the database that would explain the
problem. What a pain these things are!

After yesterday's discussion with Tessa Ambrose I had the feeling that we
were finally making headway towards getting a contract signed with JG King. And then today I received dead tree mail
from Tessa with another item that she hadn't mentioned yesterday:

Client to provide electrical plan with exact locations of all electrical works prior to
contracts being produced.

And this from somebody who had refused to give us details of the electrics, and who told me yesterday—after the mail
had been sent—that there were no further details to discuss! You'd get the impression that
they're trying to annoy me. Whether it was intentional or not, they certainly succeeded. I
was just getting to the point where I accepted all the changes, unexpected costs and delays,
and then this! How many more unexpected events are we going to have to put up with?

I had previously made a joke of the name, “Jgking” → “Joking”. But this is no joke any
more. I'm seriously annoyed.

My main reason to go to the building site was to measure out the land for the septic tank
system. That worked well enough, though there's less space than I thought. Called up
Michelle Newman at the council and discussed details with her—everything seems
straightforward enough. Before they process the application, they (Michelle or an unnamed
colleague) need to inspect the site, and by chance she was going to be in the area this
afternoon, so she said she would try to make it if she had time. I waited at home all
afternoon, but it seems she didn't make it.

What do I do with all the old computers, books and listings in the shipping container? I
haven't looked at them in years, and we don't want to take the container with us when we
move. Chris Bahlo wants to buy it, and we should move it before the winter sets in and the
ground gets too soft. So today Stewart and Craig came by and picked up many of the old
computers, and also my old brewing fridges, to be scrapped:

So why is my TV reception so bad on tuner 2? Cables after all? The antenna cable went into
tuner 1, and from there a daisy chain cable went to tuner 2. Turned it around so that it
went from tuner 2 to 1:

I've been neglecting the air conditioning quotes. So have the people I contacted. About
the only one who was still in the running was Ian, surname unknown, from Celsius, who send me a quotation for
a Mitsubishi VRF system at the end of last month—with only one internal heat exchanger, and
using more power than our mains connection can provide!

On my suggestion that that wouldn't work, he went back and had another chat with Mitsubishi.
Yesterday he sent me his second quotation—a split system unit rather like the Fujitsu units that we have here at the moment.
I am singularly dissatisfied with the
Fujitsu units, in particular the almost complete lack of temperature control. That's
because the temperature sensors are located in the unit, compounded by the fact that they're
out of the air flow and above the pipe sensor.

Today I finally got Ian on the phone and asked him where the units measure temperature. He
didn't understand. Why I finally explained, he said yes, they're in the unit. He didn't
understand my explanation that to control a quantity, you first need to measure it. And the
quantity I want controlled is the room temperature, not the temperature inside the internal
unit. “You're the first person who has ever had problems with that”. Well, maybe the first
person who has made it clear to him that that is a problem, or who has identified this as a
cause for problems which doubtless many people have. He suggested I talk to the techies at
Mitsubishi, and he would get me the phone number when he got back to the office. But he
didn't. Instead I got a mail message:

Hi Greg further to our phone discussion this afternoon. The multi head system that we have
offered allows you to control the temperature in each room and the head units have
temperature sensoring devices which allow you to do this.

With regards your point of view about the accuracy of the temp control etc and your
comment regarding design etc your are entitled to your opinion but this is in our opinion
is not correct.

This being the case with regards your specific needs it would be better for you to consult
with other heating and cooling companies.

Still, he had one point right: clearly I need to find somebody else, who, if he also doesn't
understand the issues, is at least prepared to quote for what I want. What a pain!

Off to Bannockburn this
morning with my application for the septic tank. Spoke to Barb, who was rather surprised
that I came down just for that. But now it's in, and she has given it a preliminary
vetting. The inspection will probably happen next week.

This latest requirement from JG King is still irritating me, but today I was able to sit
down and write a mail message asking for explanation and also a request for clarification of dates, and for completeness'
sake a machine-readable copy of the dead tree document that she had sent me. In reply I got only the document
copy, along with the indication that she didn't know the word “machine-readable”, which
fortunately is in the OED.
No mention of the more serious issues.

I've had TV reception problems for years, and I've been keeping notes in my diary. Why
didn't I look there earlier? It seems that almost exactly three years ago I had the same
problem: fine-tuning was disabled. And so it was again today. Set the flag; now to see if
it helps. It wasn't helped by random variations in each direction. I seem to recall some
issues with frequency, but so far I haven't been able to find them.

Watching Loup on
TV today. What interested me most was now Nikolai reacted. We've already established that most dogs don't pay any attention at all to what
goes on on TV, while cats do. But Nikolai very definitely did, to the point of going up to the
image of a wolf on the screen and touching it with his nose.

The film itself was interesting. It appears to be taking place
in Siberia in the present, but it's the
story of a reindeer herdsman who, instead of killing some wolves he found, makes friends
with them. On the one hand it's suggestive of the way dogs first became domesticated, but
it's also a bit too fast. Maybe the cubs would have made friends with him, but I can't
imagine any amount of domestication would domesticate a wolf that grew up in the wild. And
the way the (only) male catches a rabbit (are there rabbits in Siberia?) shows that he has
never really caught one:

Particularly the way Tanya carries her sticks
puzzled us: why not hold it in balance? Because that's not what's in her genes, clearly.

Oh, and talking of genes, one thing's now clear: dogs are descended from wolves, not jackals
or other canids. Thus the change in the
binomial name from Canis
familiaris (familiar dog)
to Canis lupus familiaris
(familiar wolf dog).

Call on the phone from Tessa Ambrose this morning to tell me—only—the depth of the sewage
outlet from the house: 0.6 m below surface, which won't make Mari happy. I asked once again
why she hadn't told me about the electrics. Apparently she had in some email. Still no
reason not to mention it on the phone.

And yes, they need an schedule from the electrician so that the other workers (“trades”) on
site don't accidentally damage something. I asked about the absence of markings for smoke
detectors on their own plans, and she confessed that they had never put them there. Still,
Stewart was there, so I got him to talk to her, and he agreed to submit a marginally
marked-up copy of her own plan. We will be able to make changes on-site, and of course
Stewart will keep the supervisor informed.

And the rest? Still no reaction to the fact that she had once again sprung this item on me,
nor for the dates. I had to explicitly ask her, upon which she came up with the following
schedule:

Plans complete: early July.

Contract: mid-July.

Building permit: late July.

Construction commences: early August.

Construction complete: late March or early April 2015.

That's a delay of nearly 6 months, and at least 9 months from now!! She asked innocently if
that were inconvenient, and I told her how much of a delay that was. She started blaming
Tom Tyler again—dammit, for me Tom and Tessa are just part of JG King, and they should stand
up to their mistakes rather than finger-pointing. But that's OK: she found a new
culprit—me! It seems that I should have ensured that Tom put all the right things into the
new home estimate. I hung up on her.

When I had calmed down a bit, sent her another mail message, copying her manager Wayne
Jones, asking for an immediate and unreserved written apology. None came. It's looking
more and more like we'll have to change builders.

JG King's building schedule is so slow
that even now, 6 months after starting, it could be faster to get some other builder to take
over. There's a certain cost involved, of course—maybe—but I've lost confidence in the
company. Time to go to Ballarat and see
what others can offer.

First, though: what about the reputation of the builders? Product Review Australia has a ratings page for
Victorian builders, which includes a surprising number of builders in other states.
JG King got only
2.1 points out of a maximum of 5. The best was Hotondo with 4.5.
And Simonds, whom we are considering, got only 1.8. The other one I looked at
was Metricon, who got
3.0, pulled down by at least one review saying basically “These reviews look terrible! I'm
not going to touch them!”.

So: what to do? Off to Hotondo to take
another look at their offerings. Yvonne was rather taken by
their “Gippslander” range, only two sizes: too small and too big. They're probably more expensive than we
can afford, but that's to be seen. Then to Lucas and took another look around. More sites
were open, but not many. Yvonne doesn't want to go near Dennis Family Homes, and in the end the only
other house we looked at was Dimension, which was probably the most expensive of all, and not very interesting. Took another
look at the Metricon display homes, but in
the end decided they weren't quite as interesting as I had thought on Monday.

At Simonds Colette was not there—at our
periodontists in Geelong, as it proved—so
we just left behind our requirement list and went again.

So did the fine-tuning help with my TV reception? Not so far. But I've also noticed
particularly bad radio reception, so maybe there's some interference causing the problems.
I have enough other stuff to do to be bothered with chasing it down right now.

Keyboard? This is a mouse! And though I count 6 buttons, and the “instructions” claim 8,
the probe only finds 5, and only 4 work for me. I suppose the scroll wheel counts for
another 2. But what about the arrows on the scroll wheel and the buttons on the left?

What do those symbols mean? Somebody on IRC told me: the one at the top means “Internet Explorer” and the one at the bottom means “Microsoft
Outlook”. So the designers of this mouse have confused hardware functions with specific
programs that they expect the user to use. Even if you're using Microsoft, there's no
reason to assume that you'd use those specific programs.

I had a more immediate problem, though: the thing didn't react. After a bit of
experimentation, discovered that the oval thing at the bottom side of the scroll wheel was
both the advertised but undocumented on-off switch and also an LED that briefly goes on when
it's pressed:

If not used for a while, it turns off. Presumably the power consumption of the device is so
high that this is necessary.

And the Microsoft buttons? xev showed no reaction. Presumably they generate
keyboard events, but I wasn't able to detect them. Still, I wasn't really looking for
buttons there. The mouse does its job, and it slides well on the desktop.

Call from Colette Jackson of Simonds this
afternoon. She had a quote for me based on the specifications I left with her yesterday.
She didn't want to tell me on the phone: we had to come into the office. Oh well, why not?
Off through the pouring rain to see what she had put together. Very expensive! A total of
$256,060 including BAL 19 and site costs. How does that compare to the JG King offering? We've been through so many
iterations that I don't really know. Back at home, compared the base prices as well as I
could:

Item

JG King

Simonds

House

Aldelphi II

Marriott 3016

Area

223.77 m²

224.92 m²

Base price

200,900

189,900

Additional room

5,706

Flooring

5,883

17,568

Planning

1,500

Site costs

14,000

10,000

BAL 19

8,000

10,000

Total

230,283

233,174

The difference for the flooring is because Simonds doesn't supply any flooring, while JG
King supply carpets.

So they're comparable, especially since so many items are just estimates. The difference in
site costs could be due to the results of the soil test, which JG King have seen and Simonds
haven't. In addition, the quote we got from Simonds only addressed a few of the items I
have on my requirements list. Getting into the nitty-gritty is even more of a pain.

But wait! There's more! The 14 week specials are still available, even if the sign outside
the display home now says “all taken”. They have a house for $174,000, including flooring
and a few other odds and ends. It's only 194(.84) m², but we could modify the garage as my
office, like I had planned earlier. Back home, seriously considering that alternative. It
took a while to sink in that we're comparing the $189,000 and realistically $10,000 for
flooring for the Marriott with the $174,000 for the Westbury. For that difference I can
only barely build a separate garage and convert the existing one to an office. Is it worth
it? I think not.

Pene (pronounced “Penny”) Kirk, the vet, and her partner Don Larpent over for dinner
tonight. Pene is seething: she has been participating in a programme to teach
schoolchildren about how to behave with dogs, a plan that Yvonne had also been interested in. But Pene has decided to give it up: a week or two ago she
had a session at a school
in Linton, where the children
had a great time. They wrote it up in the local newspaper, and everybody was happy.

Everybody, that is, except the bureaucrats. One of the people running the programme noted
that some of the children had collected hair from Pene's dog, who was moulting, and made
small balls of it. No matter that moulting is a normal function, nor that the dog had been
washed immediately before the event, nor that a qualified vet had confirmed that there was
no risk to the children: the bureaucrats know better. I'm reminded of so many other issues
with Victorian bureaucrats.

And that wasn't the only one! On an earlier occasion she was at a kindergarten
in Sebastopol. The
kindergarten teacher told her off for saying “excellent” to the children.

What? What's wrong with that? It seems that 4-year-olds don't know that word, and they're
not capable of learning. How will they learn if they don't hear any words they don't
know? Sheesh.

On a more pleasant level, discussed the change of the binomial name of dogs. Pene pointed out that
dogs and wolves can freely cross-breed and produce fertile offspring, thus justifying the
classification as Canis lupus. That
doesn't work with other canids. We
discussed that further, and somehow I got to the consideration: “Have there been any known
cases of interbreeding between humans
and chimpanzees“? Pene: “Tony
Abbott”.

So now we have two potential builders as an alternative to JG King. The time frame is interesting:

Builder

Contract

Building

Probable

available

starts

completion

JG King

mid-July

early August

April 2015

Hotondo

early July

early August

January 2015

Simonds

early July

early August

January 2015

Simonds express

early July

early August

November 2014

So clearly JG King are way out of line. Yes, it will cost probably $1000 to $2000 to
change, but that's probably less than we would save on the bridging credit. And based on my
current experience, I have no confidence that JG King will really complete by the time they
say.

The only issue is: we like the house. After looking at the others, only the Marriott from
Simonds seems comparable, and even then
we'd have to make more adjustments. So we're no closer to a solution.

When we signed the agreement with
JG King, we were talking about having
the house completed in September. Now it's looking like it'll take at least another 6
months. What went wrong? There are two separate tracks: getting permits and doing the
paperwork with JG King. We were sure that the former would take much longer than the
latter: Tom Tyler had told me something about 2 weeks. Let's look at where the delays crept
in:

Permits

We had reckoned with 3 months for the planning permit. That would have been the end of
March. But Tom told us that we couldn't apply for the planning permit until we had the soil
test report. That took until 28 January, 6 weeks, and 4 weeks longer than promised.

Delay

Responsible

Cause

42 days

Tom Tyler

Incorrect information about requirements

In fact, it turned out that we didn't need the soil test for the application. But that
turned out not to be so important.

I set to applying for the planning permit immediately, and the following day I discovered that
I had to provide a Bushfire Management Statement. Getting that was much more painful than I
had expected, and in the end I decided to get the statement prepared by a consultant. That took until 14 March, a delay
of—coincidentally—43 days.

Delay

Responsible

Cause

43 days

Greg

Too late applying for the BMS

These delays don't add up; it's a total of 43 days. If we had applied for the BMS in time,
it still wouldn't have arrived before the soil test.

But we're not done yet. I couldn't make sense of the verbiage in the statement, and it
proved that there were errors in it, in particular missing buildings. Finally clarified
things on 24 March, more
or less.

Delay

Responsible

Cause

10 days

McClellands

Incorrect wording of BMS

It sounded like a good idea to talk to the council about whether they'd accept it. Called
up on the same day and discovered that I couldn't get an appointment for another week.

Delay

Responsible

Cause

7 days

Golden Plains Shire

Delay for appointment

On 31 March I finally talked to the planning people
in Bannockburn and handed
in the application for the planning permit. It was granted on 30 May, 61 days after
application.

Delay

Responsible

Cause

-31 days

Golden Plains Shire

Faster than estimated

If we had done everything right, assuming that the 43 days for the BMS were typical, and
going on our previous assumptions, the permit would have been issued on 6 May. So we lost
24 days.

JG King planning

Tom Tyler had told me that we would need about 2 weeks to get the contracts issued, and
indeed that seems to be typical, that the building permit would be a matter of 2 or 3 days,
and that building had to commence within a week after that. So on 8 April, shortly after
applying for the planning permit, I called up Tom and got his mobile voice mail. Based on
his statements, it didn't seem to be urgent, so I waited to see how long it would be before
he called back.

That's now nearly 2½ months ago, and we're still further from the contract than the original
estimate of the total: if we're lucky, it'll be another 4 weeks. What went wrong here?

Tom didn't call me back until 14 April, 6 days later, and suggested a meeting a week later
to finalize the plans. We met on 21 April and—I thought—addressed
most of the issues. We were still confident of being in the house by the end of November.

Delay

Responsible

Cause

13 days

Tom Tyler

We still needed to provide Tom with a list of the extras we wanted from their promotion. We
tried to do that immediately, but a number of questions popped up. We
tried to contact Tom, but he wasn't available, and it wasn't until 30 April that we were
finally able to send him our
list of extras.

Delay

Responsible

Cause

9 days

Tom Tyler

not available

Nothing happened until 14 May, two weeks later. Tessa Ambrose called me because I hadn't
replied to the SMS that she had sent to my
mobile phone.

Delay

Responsible

Cause

14 days

Tessa Ambrose

not known

I restrained myself from commenting about the appropriateness of the medium, discussed
things with her, and agreed to do things by email. She sent a requirements document that—of
course—had a number of things missing, and a large number of items were still “Provisional”.
I sent her back a reply clarifying the things that Tom had left out. I also flagged a couple of clerical errors.

In the next week we had a number of exchanges. Some of the quotes were completely
hair-raising. Without any explanation she added $1,500 for “category B drawings”, whatever
that may mean, and changed some of the agreed prices. She quoted $2,653 for roughly 80 m of
unterminated fibre (about $1 per metre), and we spent some time trying to get the electrics
straight. This wasn't helped by the apparent lack of communication inside JG King with
their electricians. In my first message I made a request for wiring information, and it
wasn't until 27 May that I received a completely inadequate reply: “I have discussed this
with my manager and he has advised that we would never provide the wiring layout. It is the
responsibility of your electrician to design this layout”. This kind of poor communication
delayed things further.

Delay

Responsible

Cause

13 days

Tessa Ambrose

poor communication?

Round here the planning permit arrived, which I sent to her in machine-readable form. She
then discovered that there
is no sewage or running water
in Dereel—something that she could have
guessed. Since it seems to make a (surprisingly high) difference in price, she should have
asked in advance. This suggests to me that she doesn't have the experience to do the job.
Instead she blamed this on Tom, not for the first time. That's none of my business.

To be on the safe side, I pointed out to her that—like everywhere in Victoria outside the
cities—we have no mains gas. No, she didn't know that either, and came up with more extra
costs as a result.

On 13 June she called me up with
information about the sewage outlet, something that she should have done by email. She
didn't address a number of serious points in a previous email, and I had to ask her
specifically, particularly in regard to this question:

I should also reiterate that we are very unhappy with the slow progress of this project.
It's been 6 months since we started, and we still don't even have a contract. Please give
us a definitive date when we can move in, with contractual penalty if you do not reach
this date.

She gave me a schedule that would basically have us moving in in 10 months. This is based
on her claim that she had submitted the plans to drafting on 3 June. Why so late? The
plans have been unchanged since 20 May.

So where do we go from here? According to her explanation, it will take 4 weeks for the
plans, another two weeks for the contract (why?), another two weeks for the building permit
and yet another two weeks to start construction. That's a total of 10 weeks instead of the
two I had been promised.

Delay

Responsible

Cause

42 days

JG King

not explained

And the building time? I had been told an absolute maximum of 7 months, usually more like
5. But Tessa says “March, maybe April”. That sounds like at least 8 months to me.

Based on the sales pitch, we should have been able to expect the contract two weeks after I
contacted Tom, on 22 April. Instead it looks like it'll be ready, say, 14 July. That's not
two weeks, it's well over three months! We can probably then leave the issue of when
construction starts—that's not completely out of line with what Tom said. But he suggested
that we would have the project completed probably within 5 months. Now Tessa is saying
(effectively) 8. Another 6 months!

Step

Delay

Contract

83 days

Building

91 days

Tessa has blamed everybody except herself for this problem, although it's clear that she's
very much part of the problem. Instead I had to hear:

The length of time this has taken is not unusual due to the number of changes you have
made and the clarifications that have had to be made due to many items being left off your
initial quote.

What changes? I've been back and checked, and the only changes I made were because of
ridiculous things like the cost of fibre. The only thing that we have added was a sliding
door in the pantry, at her suggestion. That shouldn't blow things out from 2 to 14 weeks.

Still no apology from Tessa Ambrose in the mail today, but I did hear from Tom Tyler: he's
taking over the project. No suggestion of apology from him either, not that he needed to,
but I found it inappropriate to criticize the tone of my last message to Tessa.

Still, they've found somebody else for me. Will things happen faster? Tom has promised to
try to speed things up, but can he? It's fairly clear that he (like Tessa) has little
influence on the other parts of JG King. But if we've made a point, it might help speed things up a bit.

Today was Nikolai's birthday, and we took the
dogs—again—to Stones Road to run around a bit. I'm still having great difficulty taking
video, especially because they run straight past me:

But then Nikolai saw a kangaroo—I think—and the three of them disappeared into the undergrowth
at the west end of the property. We went down to take a look, but of course there was no
sign of them: there are too many holes in the “fence”.

In the past we've seen kangaroos leave heading south-west across Bliss Road, but the dogs
seemed to be veering north-west towards Progress Road. So we headed that way, wondering if
we'd ever see them again. But not far from the back of our property we saw Zhivago and Tanya crossing the road. And while we were loading them into the car, Nikolai came out
behind them from the scrub. So no harm was done, but it's clear we can't let them run there
again until the fencing has been done.

Yvonne returned from shopping last week with a thing called a
“Pork Loin Roast Satay”. That proved to be a normal loin roast coated in something that
looked vaguely like satay sauce, and presumably contained peanuts, something that Yvonne
doesn't like:

The interesting question was how to cook it. It weighed 600 g. My cooking time page suggested 50 to 80 minutes per
kg, but this one was relatively thin, about 8 cm in diameter. Most cooking time charts
don't take the shape of the meat into account, but clearly it's important. I did it in the
table oven at 190°, and it took 45 minutes to reach 78°. Despite the thinness, that's 75
minutes per kilogram. How do I factor that in to my table?

And the taste? Not overly satay-like, but a nice piece of meat. And in this case I think
that the conventional wisdom is correct: 78° is a little on the low side. At least for this
kind of meat I'll aim for 80° next time.

Finally got a quote for my minuscule biodiversity offset: $5,995! That includes a brokerage fee of $1,320. And that for
removing four trees and a little grassland. Somehow that's completely ridiculous. We could
replant the trees elsewhere on the property, and if the grass is that important, we can find
methods to enhance the proportion (currently 25%) elsewhere on the property.

On the other hand, this only relates to construction work. At any later time I'm allowed to
create a garden, in the process removing the native vegetation. What has got into these
people? Tried calling Nick Jaschenko, but he's on leave until 4 August 2014. His replacement is Jeff Miller, phone 5362 0727, but he wasn't available and
didn't call back. I'm not sure he could help anyway.

On other matters, things seem to be progressing on the JG King front. A long discussion with Tom Tyler,
who told me that the plans will now be finished on 26 June 2014, and
that we should be able to sign the contracts by early July, start building in mid- to late
July, and be completed after their target of 140 days. That would put our completion date
in line with what we had hoped, the anniversary of signing the estimate 6 months ago today.

I know that FreeBSD release 9 has issues with
USB, particularly—for some reason—on eureka, my main machine. So when I connect
cameras or backup disks to it, I first switch to /dev/ttyv0 to avoid this strange
X bug that causes the mouse to hang.

But today that didn't work. The display hung, and I couldn't get any response even after
disconnecting and reconnecting keyboard, mouse and other things. I had to
reboot. How I hate rebooting!

My troubles weren't over, though. I had no networking! After some cursing and
investigation, discovered that natd wasn't working: although it was configured, I had
put in my own firewall rules, and natd only gets started if I use the standard
firewall configuration.

That took the best part of an hour, and then we were about to go to walk the dogs. First I
had to send a mail message to one of the builders—and it didn't get transmitted to our
external server. More cursing, and discovered that it was the firewall again. Why now? I
had reinstated exactly the rules I had had before the reboot. But I had changed some of
them only a few hours ago, mainly to stop all the external TCP session setup attempts, like
these:

And it seems that in the process I killed access from localhost and didn't notice it.
That's in the standard firewall scripts, of course, but not in mine. Time to revert to the
standard version.

Then, while walking the dogs, Yvonne asked me “how do I make
a mailbox read-write again?”. That's a problem I had seen before, usually on boot, and a
reboot “solved” the issue. Ended up rebooting lagoon (Yvonne's machine) as well, but
afterwards the mailbox was still read-only. A message appeared at the bottom of the screen
indicating an flock() failure, and I got a singularly useless log message;

What's that? It's a TLA that I don't recognize, but it seems to stand for Network Lock
Manager. But if it's locks
across NFS, that should be
handled by rpc.lockd. Was it running? No. Started it, and things worked again.
But why wasn't it running? I can only assume that it had something to do with the network
problems on startup.

Yesterday while walking the dogs we found a strange pile of wood chips and feathers on the
ground. And, of course, I didn't have a camera with me. I must remember to always carry a
camera when walking the dogs. Today I brought one with me:

Finally got a call back from Jeff Miller of DEPI and discussed the biodiversity credits once again, at length—nearly 40 minutes.
Key recognitions: the Biodiversity Equivalence Units (BEU) are roughly, but not completely,
proportional to the area in question, and the Strategic Biodiversity Score
(apparently not SBS) relates to the importance of the location. It seems that the
0.08 for our location puts it pretty much at the low end of the scale, whereas he used
the Grampians National
Park—apparently his main interest—as an example of a high strategic biodiversity score.

But do we even have “native grass” on our property? Don Fortescue had only found a
little Wallaby
Grass, which apparently looks like this:

How much, if any, native grass is there there? The thin stems, perhaps? Jeff also
mentioned Kangaroo
Grass, Blue Devil (a name with so many false positives that I can't be bothered to look
for a link) and spear grass, an unidentified species
of Stipa, and which apparently produces
corkscrew-shaped seeds that bore into sheep. I seem to remember Brad M[uü]ller of the
council mentioning all except Blue Devil. Time to find somebody who can identify all of
them. Interestingly, it seems that Kangaroo Grass is widespread round the world. Can it
still lay claim to being Australian?

The other thing that makes this business so completely ridiculous is that the amount of
native grass is only marginally of interest: is it more or less than 25%? If it's less, we
don't need an offset. If it's more, it doesn't make any difference how much more: it
requires the same offset.

But back to the report. When I ran this emetic web program (apparently called nvim, and the only allowed way to calculate offsets), I had great
difficulty specifying the exact areas I was clearing. And based on the information I had
been given at the time, it didn't seem important. But now I see that I really only need to
clear a surface of 284 m² for the house, 74 m² for the shed and 300 m² for the arena, a
total of 658 m². But in the report I stated 1850 m². So it seems that it would make sense
to re-submit my application. And given the relationships, do we need a covered arena? If
not, we save a further 300 m². That would save us thousands.

Talking to Stewart Summersby about the electrical plan today, and he pointed me to Don
Biddle, phone 0409 082 351, who's a builder. He could even build a house substantially
similar to the JG King one. But no
more cheaply, so why bother? As Stewart said later on when he brought the documents, their
prices are generally not bad.

Went walking round Westons Road in the afternoon, with the intention of finding our way into
the Enfield State
Park which, like I, still thinks it's called Enfield State Forest. But at the end of
the road we found what appears to be a state road leading back south-west to Grassy Gully
Road, so we followed that. It borders on the north-west to the Mitchell's property:

It was an Eastern grey
kangaroo which had apparently tried to jump the fence, got both its hind legs caught
between two rows of barbed wire, and fallen so that it couldn't get them out again.
Yvonne wanted me to save it. How? I didn't have wire
cutters on me, and who knows what it would have done to me? In addition, it required
damaging the Mitchell's fence. In the end we decided to call the wildlife rescue people.
And of course I didn't have a camera with me. I must remember to always carry a camera when
walking the dogs. The photos above were taken after we had called the rescue people.

Continuing on the state road was interesting: there was a gate at the end, fortunately not
padlocked, and we came across a few more kangaroos. Nikolai went wild, and one kangaroo jumped in panic back and forwards between the fences
(only 1.2 m high!), without even trying to jump over them or the gate. Finally it belted
past us, straight towards Yvonne with Tanya and
Zhivago, and jumped right over them. What I
would have given to get that photo!

Then Yvonne headed off to the Marriott's, where she called them up and gave them details of
where it was, and also our phone number, while I picked up the car. Back home 40 minutes
later I got a call from Vince, who was currently trying to hoist another kangaroo out of a
mine shaft, and gave him the GPS coordinates of the gate on Grassy Gully Road. He called
again round 18:30 saying that he couldn't find the gate, so I set off looking for him. He
was at the other end of the road! It seems that he had had difficulty entering the
coordinates, and apparently the receptionist with whom Yvonne had spoken hadn't given the
details, so they were examining a different rusty gate.

Up with them, where they first put a rug over the kangaroo's head and then freed it:

It seems that they can have issues with their hips, and also the injuries could have
severely damaged the tendons in the legs, but gradually it was able to move its feet. But
the fact that it didn't try to escape suggested that there was some considerable damage
done:

I was very surprised how calm the kangaroo was during the entire operation, which took less
than 15 minutes. I had expected that even if it were unable to walk, it would thrash around
and not let anybody touch it. But about the only time when it showed any resistance was
towards the end of the attempts to load it into the car, where it picked on Vince's jacket:

Into town this morning for somewhat belated blood test (should have been on 14 May 2014, but I've just been too busy) and haircut (nominally due on
12 May 2014).

And that was all. It seems hardly worth driving 70 km for that. On the way home, driving
through Enfield
State Park, I found that the place was full of
flowering Epacris impressa, so
decided, for the fun of it, to drive the length of Misery Creek Road, which proves to end
just north of Berringa.

Just by chance, I had been reading
about Mendelian inheritance
while waiting for my blood test. Nothing new to me, but worth reviewing. One of the topics
discussed was incomplete
dominance, with the example
of snapdragons: the red colour is
dominant, but there's a recessive white version (the gene for red is deactivated). But
heterozygous flowers aren't red, they're pink.

And so, it seems is the case with Epacris impressa. At the east end of the park they're
red.

That seems to be nothing unknown, but for me it was a discovery. As was Misery Creek Road:
I'm sure it was named after the conditions on the goldfields of the day, but in fact it's
much prettier the further you get west. It's a pity that it'll remain a little too far to
take the dogs for a walk.

When I drove down Misery Creek Road, I only had Yvonne's old
Canon IXY 200F with me. It should produce good enough photos. It doesn't. Just
about every image was out of focus, and I didn't notice until I was back home. What a pain!
I must remember to always carry a real camera when moving around.

What's that? I can think of a number of possibilities: dirt on the sensor, dust on the
lens, insects flying close to the camera. Dirt on the sensor seems unlikely, since the
pattern changes from one image to the next. Here's the same crop of the two images above
(1200×900 pixels, offset 1200+0):

Insects also seem unlikely, firstly because even if they were out of focus, there would be
some indication of their shape, and secondly they couldn't disappear so quickly: those two
photos of Vince carrying the kangaroo were taken 3 seconds apart. I'm baffled.

Still, it's worth looking at the lens. I saw no dust—until I shone a bright torch over it.
Then there was plenty to be seen. But it's really difficult to highlight it, and to get a
good photo took me a total of 18 attempts, from those that didn't show much via those that
made the lens surface look completely pitted to one that showed so much more dust than I
could imagine:

Phone call from Peter Gavin today, one of the biodiversity consultants. At the moment he
doesn't have any credits to offer, so it seemed pointless discussing it with him. But he
came up with a surprising number of interesting insights.

Most importantly, he confirmed that the price of the only credits I had been offered was
pretty much on the high side, but also that the people from DEPI didn't have any idea about the prices. In fact,
few people had an idea at all. There are plenty of people who say things like that about
others, of course, but Peter could back it up with plausible information. One of the most
important things was that the trees I wanted to remove
(Acacia melanoxylon or
Blackwood) didn't require an offset, since they're not “canopy trees”
(effectively eucalypts). And like me,
he also has his doubts about the claimed 25% native grass in the area that needs to be
cleared.

The problem: assuming we can prove it, we'll need somebody like Peter whose authority the
council will accept. And he, too, will cost money, and in addition, he can't do anything
until the end of next month. So I'm not out of my deliberations.

Other things of interest: it's not absolutely necessary to use nvim to create the biodiversity map. It
seems that he creates a GIS map and feeds
that into nvim. Probably not something that I can do.

In addition, each council has its own schedule of which species are worthy of protection and
thus require offsets. They're in section 52.17 of the Planning Scheme,
which I still need to inspect.

It seems that Yvonne has been conspiring with Ron Frolley to
buy another dog from him. Today she finally talked to me about it. He's 4½ months old
(born on 3 February 2014), and he's a half-brother of Nikolai—or is he? They have the same father (Ch. Zoloto
Zoviet Iliyoskin, called Yoshi):

Niko's mother is Ch Zoloto Zoviet Zoe, a littermate of Zhivago, while the new dog's mother is Zoloto Zoviet
Zandra, also a full sister and littermate of Zoe. So how closely related are Nikolai and the
new one? Clearly more so than if the mothers had not been so closely related. I need to
think it through.

But Fourborzois? We have
difficulty handling the three we have already. But Yvonne had a solution for that: sell
Nikolai, the only dog who has ever liked me.
And almost before I knew it, she had tipped him out of his basket:

And why? She always wanted a black dog. And this from somebody who, six months ago, had wanted brindles:
that's why we bought Tanya. In any case, Nikolai is black (and white). But no, the dog
she has her eye on is completely black, apart from the white patches.

I was really unhappy about Yvonne's idea of buying a new dog,
and didn't sleep well. In the end I came to the conclusion that the only practical way of
handling it would be to give Zhivago back to
Ron—after all, he was his favourite. But when I got up, Yvonne had come up with a different
“solution”: sell Tanya, her favourite,
and a dog with the most beautiful brindle coat. I was flabbergasted. So was Chris when she
heard. I'm reminded of women who change their dogs to match their new handbag.

Not in the best of moods, retired to my office. Gradually Yvonne worked on me: maybe we
could handle four dogs after all. OK, OK, we could always take him on trial. At least take
a look at him. Why do I get myself talked into these things?

Off to Melbourne round 11:00, taking Nikolai and Tanya with us. Going to Melbourne always
involves a visit to the Victoria Market, which
closes at 13:00. Fortunately the traffic was good, and we got there round 12:40, so I
dropped Yvonne outside the entrance and off to park the car—they're now charging a minimum
of $8 for parking! Found a parking meter outside where I was able to park for 37 minutes
for only $4, and inside to discover that they (now?) shut at 17:00 on Fridays, and on other
weekdays they're also open until 14:00. Bought far too much cheese and the usual sausage
from the Poles, then off to Casa
Iberica, mainly for masa. In passing,
it's worth noting that there's a similar URL http://www.casaiberica.com.au/ that currently redirects to https://spanishfoods.com.au/,
which I think I must give the prize for being the most broken web site I have ever seen. It
is completely content-free:

There's so little information there that I don't even know if the company really exists, let
alone where it's based. But it appears to have nothing to do with our Casa Iberica.

Then on to Warrandyte. We didn't stay long. Ron is not feeling his best, and for Yvonne it
was a foregone conclusion that we would pick up the dog. And so it was. We put Tanya and
Nikolai together with the other puppies, most of whom were about the same size as Tanya—and she
was afraid of them, including the one that Yvonne had chosen. That's him on the right,
chasing Tanya in the foreground out of the field of view:

Made very good time through Melbourne—only 12 minutes from the end of the Eastern Freeway to
Citylink, something that usually takes more than twice as long. And that in Friday rush
hour! Got home round 17:45 and spent a while trying to acclimatize the new dog (pedigree
name Zoloto Black Jack, whom we will call Leonid, shortened to Leo).

Nikolai and Tanya were with us at Ron's, but they didn't really see much of Leonid after we left,
and they didn't get to know him until back home. The reactions were very interesting: Tanya
was jealous, while Nikolai really took to him, and soon they were lying together on the
lounge-room floor:

Leonid is only 4½ months old, and there's no
reason to believe that he has been house-trained. Normally Yvonne keeps the dogs in her bedroom overnight, but under the circumstances it seemed
a better idea to leave him out in the dog run. We couldn't leave him alone, of course, so
we put Nikolai in with him. Nikolai was not
amused. Round 3 am I heard Leonid whining, and a little later I heard something on the
verandah: Nikolai. Somehow he had broken out; we found out later how:

Run the cursor over the images to compare with the
partner. I can't see any difference at all. Now if I could only tell
it that the body was a Four Thirds body; but so far that has failed (“This combination is
not supported”).

Somehow my “fix” to the MythTV configuration
didn't do the job. I'm still getting really bad reception on tuner 2. About the only thing
I have eliminated is the cabling: tuner 2 is the first tuner in the daisy chain, and it's
the one with the problems. It looks like I'll have to try to recover the old tuner database
and see if there's something obvious about the differences.

That's not the only problem. Recently just about every new programme has simply not been
recorded. Looking in the log file, I find things like:

This looks like a problem with Al Jazeera news, but in fact it appears to be a tidy-up of the program table. And somehow the
start and end times look strange. I haven't seen any before that don't start and end on the
minute. Time for some MySQL maintenance, but in
all likelihood the duplicate keys (where did they come from?) will be gone by then.

Today was midwinter's day, but the garden still has flowers. In particular, the “Phyllis
Bide” climbing rose that Laurel Gordon brought us five years ago is still flowering well enough for Yvonne to make a vase arrangement of it:

But wait! This mecablitz has a second flash tube in the body. So did its predecessor,
which I got 5 years ago, but I've never used it. How does it work? Went looking through
the menus and found nothing useful. RTFM time.

First discovery: they call the tube a “second reflector”. Yes, like all flashes it has a
reflector, but without the tube there would be no illumination. And they've chosen the most
ridiculous symbol I can think of to represent it:
. Armed with
that information, I was able to turn it on. It only has four brightness settings: Full, ½,
¼ and 0. And with the exception of 0, they're all too bright for this scenario. Ended up
taking the final image with the secondary flash set to ¼ and with my finger covering about ⅔
of the opening.

Last week Yvonne bought the biggest leg of “lamb” I have ever
seen: 1.75 kg without bones, and in a net. How long do you roast it? It seems that I
hadn't written that up. I set it for
63°, and it took nearly 2 hours—and was overdone. I think I must have put the temperature
probe in an air pocket. Next time I'll put it at the end we're likely to eat.

DxO Optics “Pro” is one of the slowest programs I've ever used. Even on a relatively fast machine it takes
about a minute of CPU time per image. But clearly that's not slow enough: the latest
version includes a noise reduction algorithm that slows it down to about 15 minutes of CPU
time on my machine. Is it worth it?

I've been taking photos of the dogs with the camera sensitivity set to 33° ISO (1600
linear), and there's some noise to be seen. Today I tried the effect of PRIME. It's hard
to see:

It's not until you magnify the detail images to their original 600×450 crop and run the
cursor over them that a small difference becomes apparent. I suppose the fact is that
the noise at 33° ISO just isn't enough to make recovery worthwhile.

More considerations of the biodiversity question today. Got round to following up on Peter
Gavin's suggestion of looking at section 52.17, and found the schedule: empty. But then I found the planning scheme,
which includes not only 52.17 but (unsurprisingly) 52.16, which also relates to the clearing
of native vegetation, and there are lots of exceptions. As Peter had said, only canopy
trees count, so the Acacia
melanoxylon don't require permission.

Found a number of other documents on the topic—how many trees have died to print them?
This one contained
this gem:

It can be difficult for people who are not trained botanists, horticulturalists or natural
resource managers to identify areas of native vegetation that don’t include trees.

Ran the nvim toy again and
tried to enter the shape of the house and the shed. It's simply not possible; it's not
designed to work with such small areas, and the jumps in the length of lines are in the
order of 50 cm. And when you have a line, there's not much you can do with it except try to
draw an unmeasured rectangle that approximates to it.

In the end had two quadrilaterals that approximated. One was 0.027 ha (for the 263.92 m² of
the house) and 0.007 ha (for the 73.5 m² of the shed) for a total of 0.034 ha. And that
gave me—not surprisingly—an offset amount of 0.003 units. Presumably so would 20 m² more or
less. Given the price of these offsets, they could specify a higher precision.

Called up Peter Gavin, who still has not looked at my photos, but will do so soon. Also
called Mike Sorrell of the Friends of the Ballarat
Botanical Gardens, who came up with the names of a couple of people who might be able
to identify the grasses.

Finally got a second quote for the offsets from Nick Lewis, considerably cheaper than the
ones we have been offered. In combination with the reduced offset, that could get us down
under $1000 even if we have to buy one.

Sent off mail messages to the experts that Mike Sorrell pointed me at today, and got
responses from both of them. Mark Richardson of Planning for Plants said he couldn't identify
from a photo, especially not in winter, so why not wait until the summer? That's a
perfectly sensible answer, but clearly not one that I can do much with.

Roger Thomas, about whom I only know that he writes articles in
the BallaratCourier, was more certain: at least 50% native
grass, in particular Weeping Grass.
It's interesting to note how much difference in opinion there is. In any case, it's
becoming clear that I'm going to have to bite the bullet.

It's becoming clearer all the time that Tanya's
days with us are numbered. It's very painful: the only reason is because we have too many
dogs, and she's like part of the family. But Jenny McArdle wants to buy her, and Yvonne thinks she's an ideal person to take her.

Maybe if I had time to get used to the idea it wouldn't be so bad. But Yvonne sprung it on
me only 4 days ago. When we
decided to get rid of Nemo, we were thinking of it for
months, and I didn't have the relationship with Nemo that I do with Tanya. The pain!

Interesting paper mail from Australia Post today: they're going electronic. Instructions on how to set up an electronic mailbox, with
the comforting URL http://www.digitalmailbox.com.au/, showing
instantly that it's related to Australia Post. As an aside, why are people creating such
long domain names lately? Not only do most people not type well, but the toys they use to
access the web make it even more difficult.

Still, it was worth trying. Setup was easy modulo the stupid password rules. It seems
that A2z is an acceptable password, but Don't break in isn't. And the
confirmation email I got was typical of “modern” systems:

And security? The first part was setting up the account. No security checking at
all, beyond potentially something in the background that checks that the name and address
match some records they have. But that would require more intelligence than I'm prepared to
assume. Still, security is particularly important on this site: one of the purposes is to
pay bills, so they want credit card numbers and things like that. Not from me.

But they see it differently. The paper I received contained a FAQ list that I haven't been
able to find online, including:

The digital mailbox employs industry-leading security practices, technology and features
for all communications and transactions. This includes the use of the highest levels of
encryption so you can rest assured your information is safe and secure with us.

But on the web site they state:

MyPost Digital Mailbox uses AES 128-bit encryption plus a range of other measures to
protect your details and documents. So with bank-grade security in place, you can sleep
easy knowing your information is safe and sound.

Not only do they not have “bank-grade security” (in comparison with ANZ bank, they have weaker encryption than Wikipedia, and it's not AES encryption at all. And
who, apart from Australia Post, claims
that RC4 is state-of-the-art? To quote the
Wikipedia page, “RC4 has weaknesses that argue against its use in new systems”—exactly what
they have done.

Beyond that, though, why? What good is this service in the first place? The last
thing I want to do is to put my financial details anywhere on the web, not even on my own
external server. Still, I have found one good thing about it: for some obscure reason
they're giving away free postage stamps with it, so each of us can get 50 a year, probably
more than we use.

“Windows can't open this file”. Why not? Sure, I don't have “Word”, but even Apple's base
utilities can approximate to reading it. OK, off to search the web, which came up with
FreeFileViewer. Installing that
involved running the gauntlet of a whole lot of spamware:

Do I? I'm not knowledgeable enough to determine whether it's right or wrong, but why should
I trust software that installs itself on my computer without so much as a by-your-leave?

In any case, it installed and didn't run correctly. Still More Broken Software? Or just a
broken install? Then it occurred to me: OpenOffice. Yes, I hate OpenOffice, but it's better than the alternatives. Installed that, and it ran. And the document
consisted only of three images! How people abuse document formats.

So it looks as if I can get by with the revised estimate of the biodiversity offset that I
made on Monday if I just remove
the horse arena that we didn't necessarily want anyway. Just as I was pondering this, got a
call from Peter O'Brien of the Golden Plains Planning Department, so discussed that with him. He seemed optimistic,
so called up Bram M[uü]ller of the Biodiversity people, and he was also agreeable. He also
agreed that the Acacia
melanoxylon were not canopy trees, and so they could be removed without problems. And
to top it all he said we didn't need an offset for the arena, because it wasn't in use
continually and grass could continue to grow. So all I needed to do was to fill out a PDF
application and take it
to Bannockburn, where I met
Peter, he looked at the application and said yes, that's fine, and I'll get the revised
permit in a couple of weeks. But I can buy the offset now, and hopefully nothing will delay
commencement of building.

What a relief! I've been dreading this stuff, and life looked so much better when I left
the council buildings. Even the weather seemed to have thought so: it had been really dark
and unfriendly all day, but when I came out, the sun was shining.

In passing, it's interesting how even the people who administer this legislation find it
unfair and inappropriate. Bram says that it will probably get changed some time soon. But
too late for me.

Visit from Cherree Benter and her daughter Alyssa today. They're friends of Ron Frolley and
Steven Zuideveld, and they're on their way
from Portland to spend the
weekend at Ron's place and look after his dogs while Ron and Steven are at a show
in Albury. Went for a walk in the forest
while they were here:

I've taken lots of photos of the dogs since we got Nikolai and Tanya, but none of them have
been posed. High time to get some of Tanya: she's leaving tomorrow, and we'll probably
never see her again.

It's not easy getting good photos. In principle you want them with a completely blank
background, but where do you get that? In a studio, of course, but we don't have one. The
best I could do was the biggest blank stretch of wall I could find in the house, and even
that wasn't big enough for Nikolai:

It should be almost impossible to get camera shake on an image like that with the Olympus OM-D E-M1. What
happened? The EXIF data, which appears if
you run the cursor over the images,
shows that my image was exposed for 1/125 s at f/6.3 (EV 7.6), while Yvonne's was exposed
for 1/20 s at f/22 (EV 8.5). At the focal length (56 mm, corresponding to 112 mm on a
full-frame camera), it's not surprising that there was camera shake. But how did it happen?

Clearly it was accidental, but what caused it? The settings didn't last: 5 minutes after
this image I took more photos, and exposure was normal again. I would have turned the
camera off in the meantime, so it must have reset whatever it was. The first suspect is the
so-called “Program shift”, which does exactly that. But how do you set it? The pitiful excuse for an instruction manual explains: set the rear lever to position 1
and rotate the rear wheel:

But the lever was in position 2, and it's unlikely that you'd do something like that by
accident. In addition, I couldn't find any information in the EXIF data that would suggest
that.

Sent off a message to
the German Olympus Forum and got a detailed
email message back from Detlef Meinke, including screen shots and confirming that it was
Program shift. So why didn't I see it? He pointed out that Olympus Viewer 3 detects
that it's Program Shift:

And that's all that's even remotely related. Clearly I need to look deeper.

The other question is: how did it happen? I can't really believe that Yvonne would have
accidentally flipped the lever, turned the wheel and then turned the lever back. Is there
another way to set Program shift? RTFM
time. Unfortunately, the FM doesn't even mention Program shift in the index:

Searching the entire PDF document didn't bring me any closer. By trial and error,
discovered that pressing the “up” button of the arrow pad first selects some kind of
exposure compensation function. In P mode, further presses on the “up” button reduce the
aperture, while the “down” button increases it. Left and right decrease and increase the
exposure compensation respectively.

So it seems that Yvonne has been picking up the camera rather carelessly and selecting and
adjusting Program shift in the process. Don't do that, then.

But why did it take me so long to find out? Olympus' abysmally bad documentation. Now that
I know what the problem was, I went back to look for a mention of it in the manual. Not a
single mention. The menu charts in chapter 13 don't even mention what these buttons do.

Why is the documentation so bad? A couple of days I saw a used E-M1 for auction on
eBay. The reason for sale?

I did not use this camera enough to keep it. I have never mastered the menu system on
this camera because it is so extensive.

Olympus are really limiting their market with their poor documentation.

On Wednesday Yvonne bought
a sous-vide cooker from ALDI. I know about the technique, but I haven't tried it
out because of the initial investment—even at ALDI it was $200 including a vacuum sealer and
vacuum bags. What if I don't like it? That's the great thing about ALDI: take it back, get
a complete refund, no questions asked.

We still haven't used it, but I'm looking at it. It seems that you can use it to make
sandwiches:

Spent some time looking for useful information
on sous-vide cooking, and came up with
Douglas Baldwin's page,
which contains considerable detail. There's also a relatively well-hidden PDF version.
Reading it you'd get the impression that sous-vide cooking can be quite dangerous, but then
the Americans are a little paranoid about food cooked at low temperatures, as I've commented
here and here. For once, though, the instruction manual sums it up relatively well:

Food cooked in the temperature “danger zone” (5°C - 60°C) for long periods could allow
harmful bacteria to grow.

Presumably that's a typo, and should read 50°C - 60°C. But what are long periods?
The instructions specify up to 8 hours for a leg of lamb, at 56° “or higher”. By contrast,
the Douglas Baldwin document states (paraphrased):

At lower temperatures 50 °C to 65 °C, Bouton and Harris found that tough cuts of beef
(from animals 0-4 years old) were the most tender when cooked to between 55 °C and 60 °C.
Cooking the beef for 24 h at these temperatures significantly increased its tenderness
(with shear forces decreasing 26-72% compared to 1 h of cooking).

For example, tough cuts of meat, like beef chuck and pork shoulder, take 10-12 h at 80 °C
or 1-2 days at 55-60 °C to become fork-tender. Intermediate cuts of meat, like beef
sirloin, only need 6-8 h at 55-60 °C to become fork-tender because the tenderization from
the enzyme collagenase is sufficient.

Yvonne bought a beef roast this afternoon, so it looks like
we'll base our first attempt on these values.

Discussion on IRC about keyboards
for Android devices
today. Jashank Jeremy opined
that Bluetooth keyboards were no good.
I've already been there, done that, and came to the conclusion that there wasn't much point attaching a keyboard to an
Android. But Jashank had a different problem: the key spacing is too small, at least on the
keyboards he tried.

But a couple of weeks ago, for a completely different reason, I blew $1 on a normal USB to
micro USB adapter, which allows me to connect normal USB devices to the tablet. Would it
work with a keyboard? Most people thought not. But they were wrong. It was recognized
immediately:

Daniel O'Connor thought it might have trouble with keys repeating, but that, too, worked
fine. The only issue was the one I identified last October: what can you do with a keyboard
on an Android?

But the real reason I bought the adapter was related to a thread in the German Olympus Forum. Jürgen von Esenwein wanted to buy an
Android tabled with an SD card reader. I suggested just connecting a USB card reader, but
Oliver Musch suggested that it wouldn't work without host mode. For $1 I was willing to
experiment.

And? When I plug the reader in, it is recognized, but I can't find anything in the
settings. How do you use these things? It seems that they have disabled all the familiar
(“intuitive”?) interfaces, possibly create new ones, but don't document them. Once again
I'm completely baffled.

I've established that the “instructions” for my Olympus OM-D E-M1 don't
describe how to set Program Shift with the arrow keys, only with the wheel. But what about
Yvonne's E-PM2? It doesn't have a
wheel. Took a look, and how about that? First the instructions for the E-PM2, then for the
E-M1:

It seems that the people who wrote the documentation adapted the fish sorts to the local
Australian market, but they only knew three, and they didn't know whether they were “white”
or “oily”, so they put them in both categories:

What's a Tenderloin? I know it's
a cut of meat, but I'm always a little confused: it's not our language. It's a fillet (or
“eye fillet” as they call it here). On the other hand, they've adapted to Australian
conditions enough to include Scotch
fillet, which the Americans
call Rib eye steak.

More to the point, though, the temperatures look relatively plausible. The times don't:

I've frequently had difficulties cooking chicken thighs on the bone, and in general the meat
needs longer than the breast. By contrast I've never had difficulty with breast. On the
other hand, all of the temperatures look plausible. Today's chicken was breast, and I
guessed that an hour would be enough. It was all I had, so it had to be.

Understanding the instructions was easier than I feared, and almost everything Just Worked.
The only issue is that the vacuum pump doesn't completely remove all the air, and so the
bags floated. I put the second rack on top, but it only partially kept them down.

How accurate is the temperature control? I checked the liquid with my infrared thermometer
and for a setting of 75° I measured 74.7°. So either both are very accurate, or they share
the same inaccuracy. I'd tend to the former.

And the results? The meat was cooked. It didn't even look as pale as people warned. But
it gave off a large amount of liquid, and the meat didn't taste any more tender, nor very
different than cooked conventionally. There are a couple of possibilities here: temperature
too high, or the marinade removes too much liquid. In any case, next time I'll try some
spiced chicken thighs for 2 or 3 hours at 72°.

Peter Jeremy commented on yesterday's
experiments with Sous-vide
cooking, and pointed me at Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks. I had been a
little irritated by the book, since it preempted my own intended title “Groggy's High-tech
cookbook”, but looking at it again online via Safari Books Online, I have to admit that it
has a lot of stuff that I would never have been able to put together. Safari is a pain to
use, so it looks like I'll have to buy a copy.

One of the most interesting aspects is the suggestion that chicken should be cooked at
between 60° and 65°, much lower than I had intended to try next time. As it states,

... but at this temperature (74°) the actin proteins will also denature, giving
the chicken that unappealing dry, mealy texture.

It's been a few days since I have done anything about the new house, but gradually I'm going
to have to do something. First question: what do I want from solar electricity? Came up
with the following requirements:

Battery backing for at least 24 kWh.

Supply up to 3 kW.

Capability of maintaining 1 kW average continuous power.

Capable of starting 750 W water pump.

Maintain battery charge from solar panels for 95% of the year.

Grid fallback for the remaining 5%.

Connection for emergency generator.

This system will not feed back to the grid. We're planning to use it for low power
consumption devices like lighting and electronics. In the summer we may switch other
consumers to the system during the day, but this is not part of the requirements for this
quote.

Based on the rule of thumb that our part of Victoria can supply the equivalent of about 3.5
full hours of sunshine per day, we assume that we can achieve these requirements with solar
panels delivering 8 kW peak. The roof is oriented due north.

Called up Sean LePoidevin of Off Grid
Energy to discuss things with him. He thought that the requirements were too high,
told me that I didn't understand the difference
between kW
and kWh, and suggested I fill out what proved
to be a Microsoft “Excel” spreadsheet, which he sent
to me.

How do I estimate the power? The spreadsheet starts off asking about the power consumption
of kitchen appliances, how many days a week you use them, and how long they run. That's all
guesswork. In particular, they mainly have thermostats. If I have a deep fryer that
consumes 2 kW and runs for 30 minutes 2 days every week, how much power does it consume?
The naïve answer is “2 kWh per week”. But that's wrong. That's a theoretical maximum
assuming that the thermostat is on the whole time, and that's never the case. The real
power consumption depends on how long the thermostat is on. And how can I find that out?
Measure it.

More to the point, though: I don't want to run kitchen appliances on this system. I
want to run computers. Connected up some power consumption meters to the systems in my
office and came to these values:

Condition

Power

eureka alone

150 W

eureka running, with monitors

250 W

eureka and dischord

340 W

That's a far cry from my 1 kW, but it's also a far cry from being all the computers in the
house. There are also lagoon, cvr2, teevee and test boxes. If I
assume they all use 200 W, that's a maximum of 1.2 odd kW, and then there's the TV, another
200 W, and lights. So 1.5 kW during the day isn't unreasonable. At night we should be able
to power down most things, and hopefully in the new house cvr2 will go away (Jürgen
Lock suggests a FreeBSD solution that could be
integrated into teevee).

Also chasing up shed builders, and got on to David Tudor (phone 0408 852 451), who sounds
like a good bloke to do the work, and he also pointed me at Lee Widdison, phone 5338 8544,
who has experience with Widespan and may be
able to help with the building permit. Dave will get back to me with costs for the slab.

In December 1983, while in hospital recovering from
an appendicectomy, Yvonne brought me a copy
of Byte magazine describing
Microsoft's new “Windows” display manager. I was
excited: we had seen this before with
Apple's Lisa computer, but this would
run on commodity hardware.

By the time it actually appeared, it was less attractive, and gradually I wandered away from
the Microsoft world. When I finally got a graphical desktop environment, it was X, not Microsoft, and I managed to stay out of the Microsoft
space almost completely until I had to use it for my photographic software a couple of years
ago.

Today I had to handle Sean LePoidevin's spreadsheet, sent as an email attachment. How do
you do that? How do I even read the mail message? It seems that Microsoft's “Outlook
Express” is no longer part of the base distribution (or I'm not Microsoft savvy enough to
find it), but after all, that's what Thunderbird is for. Installed that and tried to configure it. The installer just
hung. It wasn't until I iconified the (full-screen) window that I discovered that it had
popped up (down?) a dialogue window underneath the main window.

Why? Clearly the dialogue window should have been on top. Is this Thunderbird's fault?
Possibly, but I've seen it with other software too. For an environment that is so dependent
on windows, why is window management still, after 30 years, so abysmally bad? No
centralized window manager, so misbehaving programs can effectively lock up the screen, very
few opportunities for manipulation, and despite all that effectively no options to specify
how the windows should appear on the screen. And every release changes the rules. But at
least it's clear why most users don't use full-screen windows.

I seem to recall this from before, but it wasn't until after I reset the frequencies that I
found a diary entry on the subject. Now to
wait for another use of tuner 2. I don't really have time to record something specially
to test it.

One thing that really puzzles me about Microsoft networking is that every network interface
has a default gateway associated with it. What does that mean? I just can't see how it can
work, nor what the implementers were thinking when they did it that way.

But the poison is spreading: today I rebooted flachmann,
my Android tablet, and
for some reason a program started itself: